The first time I heard Madonna, I was 8 years old at a school disco. Horrified parents, who came to pick us up as we jumped up and down yelling along to “Like A Virgin” in a fluorescent flurry of topknots, puffer skirts and lace gloves, subsequently lodged a formal complaint (it was a Catholic junior school) and thus, the spirit of Madonna, was borne into my story.

Maggie Smith is not only a national treasure, but every casting director's go-to old bat. Now 84 years young, she is our favourite grande dame, or fantasy grandma.

If only there were more: that's a first response to Nothing Like a Dame, Roger Michell's affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of four of Britain's finest actresses, all now in their 80s. As the camera circles around Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins in conversation, it's impossible not to be swept up in a collective portrait of these remarkable careers alongside their shared awareness of the advancing years. Small wonder the one classic role they pause to debate at length is Cleopatra. Age really cannot wither this quartet's infinite variety.  

Due to be aired on the BBC following a limited cinema release, the film consists of chat caught, as it were, on the lam. Michell provides the occasional offscreen prod to get a topic going, and once in a while the film crew appears in a shot, more often than not to be shooed away by Smith. But with ladies like this, intrusions would be unnecessary as well as impolite. Who wouldn't want to hear as much as Smith has to say about pinching her comic technique from Kenneth Williams? Or from Dench, bronzed following a Cornish holiday, putting a patronising young paramedic in his place by announcing that she recently appeared on the West End in The Winter's Tale? (Pictured below: Judi Dench as Paulina, photograph by Johan Persson.)

The points of convergence between the women make for a veritable thespian cat's cradle. All except Atkins appeared in the Franco Zeffirelli film Tea with Mussolini, while I have seen Smith over the years onstage with each of the others in turn. Away from stage and screen, the ladies can all speak on what it was like having been married to an actor, Smith movingly insisting on remembering the good times she had with Robert Stephens and letting whatever else their marriage consisted of go unsaid. (She and Atkins remarried, Plowright and Dench have not.)

Filmed inside and on the Sussex grounds of the home that Plowright shared with her late husband, Laurence Olivier, this portrait of the artist as a reflective dame essentially takes the form of a round-table discussion spliced with pairings of Dench and Smith, say, on the sofa, chortling about memories and fretting about what happens with time to the memory.

The chosen clips – Dench as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Smith and Stephens in Private Lives, among others – won't generally surprise any British theatre buff who hasn't had the odd amble round YouTube, but one can surely infer from her remarks that this is yet another celluloid venture Smith most likely will not see. (She confirms once more that she has yet to watch Downton Abbey, pictured below.) Less expected, and utterly delightful, are remarks in passing about Atkins's unexpected acquaintanceship with the initials KY – cue much hilarity – and a sightless Plowright advocating yoga and mindfulness and the need always to exercise the brain.

Agelessly witty and effortlessly stylish as they are (all four have remarkable skin), the women make no attempt to conceal the toll exacted by time. Dench stops the heart, as she has made a career of doing, pausing before she talks of her beloved Michael Williams: a lifetime of feeling contained in a fleeting silence. Smith later admits to loneliness but not before informing us that Edith Evans had two sets of teeth: the gossipy and the self-aware ever-intertwined. We get talk about sharing hearing aids alongside lines from bygone plays remembered as if the years had somehow fallen away. And in one startling moment, all eyes turn in mock-fury on Dench for scooping up the best parts. (Theatre buffs will note the arrival of this film in the same week that Glenda Jackson and Diana Rigg, contemporaries all, got Tony nominations for their current Broadway parts: this generation of women, Vanessa Redgrave included, marches ever onward.)

Career highlights? Roles that got away? Changing tastes and preferences for work? Those are among the topics one could imagine explored in further depth had Michell's camera rolled ad infinitum. Let's just say that I laughed plentifully and was greatly touched and doubt I'm alone in wishing for a director's cut packed with outtakes. And when Nothing Like a Dame draws to a close with audio of Dench reciting "our revels now are ended", the only possible response is to insist that they are not.

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk 
• Overleaf: watch the trailer for Nothing Like a Dame 
• Exclusive premiere screenings tonight: https://www.nothinglikeadame.film/

Maggie Smith is in her element as Miss S in the film version of Alan Bennett's 1999 play The Lady in the Van, her partnership with the playwright-actor one of the defining components of the storied career of the octogenarian dame, whose renown has leapt the decades due in no small part to the Harry Potter and Downton Abbey franchises. 

They said there'd never be an audience for a period drama about an aristocratic Edwardian family. Six series later, we're bidding adieu to a national (and indeed global) institution, as Julian Fellowes's motley band of ridiculous, ahistorical and frequently exasperating characters potter off into the fading TV sunset. There's still the Christmas special, but – though we might not admit it – we'll miss them.

Maggie Smith rarely gives interviews. In the week that Downton Abbey's last-ever series episode is broadcast, and she reprises on screen her role in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van (pictured below with Alex Jennings), theartsdesk revisits an encounter that took place in Highclere Castle in 2010. It was the only interview Dame Maggie gave that summer apart from one – which took place just before – to Julian Fellowes.

The oldies are back at Jaipur's Marigold Hotel and they're looking like goodies, too, thanks to a British dame or two and an Ol Parker script that knows when to leave off the breeziness and let the occasional intimation of mortality hold sway. And in a celluloid landscape plagued by sequelitis, the fact that a collective of British pensioners and their newfound Indian chums have been brought back for more is itself rather bracing compared to the usual spate of avengers, transformers or what not that keep most film franchises going.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel's 2012 predecessor chronicled how it is that so motley an array of UK retirees found themselves living the expat life, a change of pace that has so taken wing that this latest film finds the eager young hotel proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel) nursing expansionist plans of a second hostelry he can add to a burgeoning portfolio. And so it is that he heads to California to make a sales pitch, the peppery Muriel (Maggie Smith) by his side. The geographical displacement in itself allows Dame Maggie to occupy vinegary pride of place, not least when she is asked upon return to India how she found America. Her deadpan reply: "it made death more tempting." (Muriel's instructions while Stateside as to how to brew a proper English cuppa will strike a chord with many a Briton who has experienced what Americans serve as "tea".) 

Much of the film's narrative embraces what the playwright Tony Kushner has called in another context "more life", whether one is referring to the cautious Evelyn (Judi Dench) deciding to make a go of it with the Tennyson-quoting Douglas (Bill Nighy) – "we're not not together," she explains when asked; or the irrepressible Madge (Celia Imrie) sizing up the available male talent, her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey a visual clue to the old gal's appetite. To widen the amorous possibilities still further, new arrivals include Richard Gere of all people as a visiting American – 64 and single! – who gets the hots for Sonny's standoffish mum (Lillete Dubey, pictured above with Gere) and Tamsin Greig as a mysterious lone traveler who .... well, perhaps best not to give the rest of what she is up to away.

What's quietly appealing about the director John Madden's second go-round with this material is that these seniors are allowed not just to have a libido but also to be available for and desirous of work. Evelyn's keen eye, for instance, lands her a job sourcing fabrics, while Muriel takes to administering the hotel with the same take-no-prisoners acumen she brings to the rest of life. The actress is simply wonderful, allowing at one point that she proffers opinions, not advice, and there's a neat reference to the age difference between her and Dench's characters that mirrors the actual disparity in age (all of 19 days) between the two women, both of whom turned 80 late last year. (Dench pictured above)

Sure, one could complain that the onscreen India envisaged here is a tad too ceaselessly colourful and charm-filled for comfort and that these people are inhabiting a fantasy-land of their own devising that doesn't relate, say, to the India one sees filling the National Theatre stage in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. But that's like faulting the film Notting Hill for not being Nil by Mouth: the two come from an entirely different place. And you have to credit all concerned for granting this second – and better – Marigold Hotel an appropriately rueful conclusion that tempers the jollity of the Bollywood-style wedding that has come just before. Or as Smith's Muriel remarks with an unforced sagacity that doesn't need to call attention to itself, "there's no such thing as an ending – just a place where you leave the story."

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 

An Off Broadway play that largely passed without notice in 2002 is now a movie poised to suffer the same fate, notwithstanding the fact that this starry three-hander marks the film directing debut of the prolific American dramatist Israel Horovitz, at the age of 75. So it's no surprise that the older generation gets championed in a script (adapted by Horovitz from his stage play) that finds Maggie Smith playing a nonagenarian who, she tells us, is too old for subtlety.

These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.

Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those moments when the veterans came back and did their piece once more with feeling – Judi Dench firing up as Cleopatra, Helen Mirren washing her thighs and despatching her husband in Mourning Becomes Electra, Maggie Smith spirited back into The Beaux’ Stratagem. Above all, Joan Plowright, long widowed and no longer sighted, returned to the stage of the Old Vic to repeat with heavy poignancy the words of St Joan she first spoke 50 years ago: “To shut me from the light of the sky… to make me breathe foul damp darkness”.

You’d get an intriguing idea of the history of musical theatre from the shows on show

And yet even if the actors were available, this wasn’t simply an exercise in carbon-copying the past. Penelope Wilton and Michael Gambon might easily have revisited Betrayal, but instead he paired up with Derek Jacobi to reincarnate Gielgud and Richardson in No Man’s Land (pictured below), and she with Nicholas Le Prévost for a slice of Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce. If the actors weren’t available, rather than do something else the parts were just recast from the company. Thus Arcadia was (rather uncertainly) peopled by new faces led by Rory Kinnear. Ralph Fiennes ferociously deputised for Anthony Hopkins as Lambert Le Roux. Rosalie Craig not Martine McCutcheon sang of the rain in Spain.

You’d get an intriguing idea of the history of musical theatre from the shows on show here: not just Lerner and Loewe and the inexhaustible Guys and Dolls (Nicely Nicely Johnson was shorn by time constraints of his traditional umpteen encores), but also the fleck and spume of Jerry Springer the Opera and the Ipswich sex worker serial killer musical London Road. And Dame Judi, trotting out “Send in the Clowns” one last time, still can’t hold a tune (no please don’t write in).

This was a compilation album with well-choreographed tonal shifts. Different buttons were pushed as James Corden beat himself up as Francis Henshall, Simon Russell Beale revisited his fiercely intelligent Prince of Denmark, and Joey the foal ballooned into a mighty stallion. And as the story of the National’s 50 years unfolded, a subtle hand was at work making connections between apparently random clips. We segued from one African queen to another as Cleopatra made way for a young gay man in Angels in America dying of Aids and missing his cat Sheba. Alan Bennett’s history boys, caught napping by the headmaster when playing at prostitution in a French class, pretended instead to enact a scene from a military hospital at Ypres. Straight after that the trenches were presaged for real in War Horse.  

And for all the in-jokes about critics and actors, rarely did it feel like a self-indulgent orgy of nostalgia. We don’t know what Rufus Norris’s reign will bring, but this highlights package suggested that it’s high time for a revival of Peter Nichols’ The National Health as the NHS endures its latest growing pains, and possibly also for Pravda as the fourth estate endures moral and financial meltdown. It’s also time for Jacobi, a very early member of the National company at the Old Vic, finally to make his full Southbank debut, possibly in some Pinter.

Quibbles and caveats? As a television event it may have all looked quizzical to non-theatregoers. Filmed theatre has come on a treat since the arrival of swooping high-definition cameras, but stage and screen will never be entirely reconciled so long as actors quite properly see it as their first duty to hit the back wall of the upper circle. Two plays about politicians from David Hare felt like too many. Only one female playwright (Alecky Blythe) was simply not enough. And aside from Clive Rowe rocking the boat, it was quite a white night for lead performers until Adrian Lester came on at the death. His Othello neatly completed the circle, the Moor having been Laurence Olivier’s first role for the National, while making the point that the National and indeed the nation has moved on in half a century.

That’s why the line of the night belonged to Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s debut play. “One is having one all the time,” he explained to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Rosencrantz, before clarifying: “A future.” See you at the theatre.

Overleaf: a gallery of images from 50 Years on Stage

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